How Are You Going To Survive and Grow In 2009?
In general businesses are having a rough time. But there are always outliers, those who buck the trend and grow while others struggle. How are you going to survive and grow your business in 2009? Are you playing it conservative or trying a more aggressive strategy?
Here’s how MerchantOS plans to not only survive, but grow substantially in these turbulent economic times:
2008 A Year In Review For MerchantOS
Before you plan for the future it’s a good idea to assess how you’ve done in the past. How did MerchantOS do in 2008? Here are some core metrics:
- Expanded from 130 retail locations to 276.
- Our revenue doubled.
- System usage grew from 900 logins/day to 1800 logins/day.
- This website had 40k visitors.
- We updated the system 30 times.
- The founders (me and Ivan) got paid a livable wage for the first time in 4 years
MerchantOS Plans For 2009
We’ve got a lot of planned for 2009. Part of our strategy is to keep improving our core point of sale and inventory control product. You (our customers) have given us tons of suggestions for ways we can better meet your business needs. Here’s a few improvements to our core product we plan to make:
- Color / Size (or Attribute) Matrix - so you can quickly take stock of your apparel and other products that come in various colors/sizes/styles.
- More Vendor Integration - we want to integrate with more vendors so it’s easier for you to order product.
- Better discounts and pricing options - so you can more easily set sales, define discounts, and generally manage your product pricing.
- Many more incremental improvements - we are always taking suggestions and looking for ways to improve the system. We want to make sure our system keeps becoming easier to use and at the same time more powerful.
We also have some big plans for new directions:
Ecommerce
The first is Ecommerce. We’ve been working on this for a while, and running our own Ecommerce store on our new system. We are starting to open this up to customers. We’re going to keep improving it and working out the bugs. Soon we’ll open it up so all of you can get a website and online store that is integrated with your point of sale and inventory.
Global Product Catalog and Reviews
We want to create a giant product catalog that contains all the products in the industries we target. With the products cross referenced between vendors/suppliers so you can see who you can order a certain product from and at what price. We are going to add the ability to write reviews of products in this catalog, so you can share your opinions on products with other business owners. This catalog is going to be as content rich as we can make it - with pictures, long descriptions of items, reviews, where to buy these products, sales statistics, and more. We’re going to do our best to pre-populate this information with data we’ve collected from vendors and manufactures. But we also are going to rely on you to help us fill in the gaps. You’ll be helping yourself and the whole community - and benefiting from the same effort by others.
Employee and Community Communication and News
We think it’d be great if you could more easily broadcast information to your employees right inside of MerchantOS. Along side of that we have some ideas about how shops in the same industry could share news and advice with each other.
Growing In Hard Times: Our Plan
Invest In Our Core Product
We put the vast majority of our time and energy into continually improving our core product/service: point of sale and inventory control.
Develop New Products
By developing new products and services we hope to expand to new customers. Ecommerce and the Product Catalog I mentioned are the main thrusts of this strategy for the next year.
A Long Term Marketing Strategy
- A Great Product and Service Is Easy To Sell - Our main marketing strategy has and will always be to make a great product and provide excellent customer service to go along with it. This is what we spend 80%+ of our time and energy doing. The other 20% is:
- Search Engine Marketing - We are making a significant long term investment in search engine marketing, that means both paid advertisements on terms that are relevant (example: type in “bike shop software” in Google and you’ll see our ad), and search engine optimization.
- Community Building - As discussed above we have some ideas about how to create more of community among you (our customers). We’ve always had good communication between us and our customers, now we want to start building communication between customers. For starters we’ve created a:
MerchantOS Facebook Company Page
MerchantOS Facebook User Group
MerchantOS Twitter Profile - Word Of Mouth - That’s You! - Since we’ve created a great product and provided excellent service, we’re counting on you to tell other business owners about it. Help us grow and we’ll keep re-investing in making the product and service you use better.
Happy New Year 2009!
What are your plans for 2009? How can we help make your business more successful?
- What do you want to see from MerchantOS in 2009?
- What about MerchantOS is a pain in the #!*%?
- Have a big idea you think we should do?
We thrive on your input. So let us have it. We want to be the best possible product/service for your business and we can only do that with your help.
Hi I'm Ivan, CEO of MerchantOS. Welcome to our company blog. Here you'll find news about our company and helpful information for those interested in point of sale systems. If you're new to our blog be sure to check out these posts:
January 18th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
I am considering using Merchant POS for my new retail store. I need to be able to manage my online store’s inventory and the physical store’s inventory in sync; all of the inventory’s units will be in low #’s (although price points will be common), so it has to be easily changed; online product images, etc. I am consdering having the store on amazon.com….
January 21st, 2009 at 9:13 am
Hi Randall, We are just now coming out with e-commerce which is tightly integrated with our point of sale system. You can upload images and control how all your items look online in the point of sale system. All transactions and inventory adjustments happen instantly between the point of sale and e-commerce systems. You can check out an e-commerce enabled demo here http://www.merchantos.com/merchantos_com_demo.php and you can see the e-commerce site managed by it here http://demo.merchantos.com/. If you have any additional questions or need help you can call us at 866 554 2453.